Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Jack Friedman
(University of Oklahoma)
Yehuda Goodman (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Plenary
- Start time:
- 10 April, 2021 at
Time zone: America/Chicago
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel considers both the history of psychological anthropology's relative lack of engagement with topics of justice and injustice, and proposes a pathway toward a future psychological anthropology that is more fully engaged with the study of justice and injustice.
Long Abstract:
Why has psychological anthropology been so (relatively) silent on topics of injustice and the struggle for justice across racial, ethnic, national, economic, gender, and environmental domains? And, while there are some notable exceptions to this trend, this is particularly difficult to understand when, in fact, scholars who identify as psychological anthropologists have often been deeply enmeshed in, engaged with, and supportive of struggles for justice. We ask, then, is there something in the ways that psychological anthropology has framed its questions, drawn on particular methods, valued particular analytics, deployed certain theoretical tools, or chosen the communities and people who we study that encouraged this distancing from issues of justice and injustice? Is this an outcome of the moral modest temperament of SPA scholarship and scholars, or is it something about the ways we think about our interlocutors? These questions set the context for exploring how psychological anthropology can better engage with issues and experiences of injustice and struggles for justice. We encourage participants to consider four questions in this regard: First, what can be drawn from within traditions of psychological anthropology to provide foundations for the study of justice and injustice? Second, strategically, what and who should we study in order engage with injustice? Third, what analytics and theoretical tools could we deploy? Fourth, what methods should psychological anthropologists draw on to accomplish these ends? Historical, theoretical, and methodological reflections as well as ethnographic inquiries are all welcomed.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Bambi Chapin (UMBC)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic research with families in Sri Lanka, I explore how key conceptual tools and orientations from psychological anthropology that I employ pose difficulties in attending to social injustice, sometimes in ways that reinforce it, and how we might do better.
Paper long abstract:
For two decades I have conducted research with Sinhala families in Sri Lanka that has been solidly grounded in the concepts and approaches of psychological anthropology. However, my work has not engaged with issues of social justice or politics in any significant way, much as these are important to me personally. In this paper, I explore how some of the central tools I use in my research and my teaching serve to point me away from issues related to injustice and inequality, and in fact may contribute to them. In particular, I will consider the concept of the strange and familiar, cultural relativity, person-centered ethnography, psychodynamic analysis, and a critical approach to psychological theories. Each of these have provided powerful guidance and insight for me, but they have also limited what I can see and speak to. Further, they may serve to reinforce the kinds of divisions and exclusions that perpetuate inequality on many levels, including in our own subdiscipline. In this consideration, I will also suggest ways that we might use these approaches and others towards more effective and inclusive engagement, pointing to how I am trying to do this in my own work.
Katherine Ewing (Columbia University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how scholars have been shaped by assumptions about the nature of the individual as a rights-bearing subject in the modern state. How might such an exploration unlock other possibilities for research on the politics of the psyche, focusing on the process of stigmatization?
Paper long abstract:
Freud watched Europe devolve into racist, anti-Semitic discourse that culminated in the utter dehumanization of the Jew and developed psychoanalytic theory against this backdrop, offering a model of the psyche that could explain how people could get caught up in this irrationality. Yet within the context of postwar secular democracies, psychoanalytic practice, like religion, came to be seen as an apolitical pursuit of individuals within their private lives. Religion has subsequently burst the bounds of privacy and the separation of church and state to become a major political force, but the psyche has been shier, demonstrating a reticence reinforced by the state through regulations such as HIPAA and IRBs, regulations that play a powerful role in shaping research agendas in psychoanalysis and psychological anthropology. In this paper, I explore how scholars have been shaped by assumptions about the nature of the individual as a rights-bearing subject in the modern state and how such an exploration might unlock other possibilities for research on the politics of the psyche, with a particular focus on the process of stigmatization.
Heather Rae-Espinoza (California State University, Long Beach)
Paper short abstract:
Injustice in healthcare has life or death consequences. Anthropologists can respond through new FDA policy encouraging patient voices in drug development. Systematic qualitative methodologies can explore heterogeneity underlying unmet healthcare needs with psychological anthropology.
Paper long abstract:
Injustice in healthcare has life or death consequences, extending well beyond clinical settings to social, cultural, and economic contexts. The focus of this paper is the FDA effort to develop Patient-Focused Drug Development (PFDD) guidance in accordance with the 21st Century Cures Act to support systematic approaches to collecting and integrating patient insight into medical product development and regulatory decision making. This initiative is an opportunity for anthropologists to bring qualitative voices directly to healthcare.
Systematic methodologies for collecting qualitative evidence are needed, and even if not always detailed in publications, a wealth of approaches characterize the fields of anthropology. In this paper, I primarily focus on the role of person-centered interviewing in drug development, where heterogeneity can too often be viewed as a lack of results rather than a goal in and of itself. Acknowledging heterogeneity is central to addressing injustice in drug development, as it can address the unmet needs of patient populations facing geographic dispersion, economic insecurity, health fragility, and discriminatory dismissals.
Psychological anthropology can illustrate patient perspectives with theoretical fluidity and individualized, holistic approaches. Cultural practices supporting transmission, subjectivity within structures of power, psychodynamic motivations underlying the internalization of schemas, and resonances of the social politic help represent patients’ perspectives. Qualitative data can be utilized with mixed methods approaches to further interpretations and, in turn, quantitative data can be validated through narratives detailing meaningful and noticeable change in symptoms. Through these efforts, anthropologists can use our position to elevate the voices of vulnerable populations.
Tal Shamur (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
“melancholic citizenship” will be suggested to describe the emotion of sadness aroused among citizens following a process that highlights their marginality. The case study explored is HaTikva district of south Tel Aviv following a global migration arousing melancholy among long-term residents.
Paper long abstract:
The concept of citizenship is often related to legal status within the nation-state. However, its actual expression is defined by one’s standing within the political community, where spaces of citizenship extend to the city level. According to this perspective, although people may be included in the collective by the state law, they may also, in actual fact, be excluded by the unwritten spatial law. This law dictates the life conditions of minorities and creates symbolic and physical boundaries that pushes “others” to the city margins where marginalized citizens and noncitizens contest their exclusions. Whereas public demonstration of discriminated citizens emerging at the urban periphery might be seen as a raging outbursts per se, closer examination reveals they are also a site of sadness and melancholy. Following this line of thought, I will suggest the concept “melancholic citizenship” to describe the emotion of sadness aroused among a discriminated group of citizens in light of a process that highlights their marginality. Based on anthropological field work I conducted in the HaTikva neighborhood of south Tel Aviv which is associated with Mizarhi Jews (Jews who immigrated to Israel from Arab countries) between the years 2010–2013, I argue that the struggle of the long-standing residents aroused melancholic feelings among them when they realized that the global migration is a current indication of their discrimination as lower-income Mizrahim, who inhabit the city periphery and are located at the margins of Israeli society.